Learning About Jefferson’s Musical Passions and a Blurb about Sunday.

Once again, I have most unfortunately fallen behind a day in keeping my daily blog. I’ve been super, super busy lately with many, many things, so I haven’t had much time at night lately to write anything up. But we will get to that later.

Sunday

Sunday was a pretty good day. Nothing much of note happened, except that my other housemate Jenna had finally settled in to join myself and Megan. She also brought her adorable and sweet puppy Lady, much to Charlie’s chagrin.

Today

Everything started fantastic as usual, I started my morning routine and made it to the Library (which now I have a habit of calling it “work” even though it’s a super fun internship) on time. I continued my studies of Jefferson’s life at William and Mary by taking more notes from the first volume of the Marie Kimball set. I would also like to note that Anna was dead on in stating on the Library’s blog that “Kimball’s research [was] assiduously documented”, as I’ve been very busy lately in hunting down the sources of the letters and other works that the author has cited. Not that I’m complaining, I’ve come to find that “chasing information”, or as Anna put it – “gathering pearls”, is definitely my cup of tea. I love it. 🙂

In my note-taking time, I also learned a little bit about Jefferson and his passion for music. Apparently he loved the popular European works and was very disappointed in the colonies’ lackthereof, as he states to a French friend in a letter dated June 8th, 1778:

“If there is a gratification which I envy any people in this world, it is your country and its music. This is a favorite passion of my soul, and fortune has cast my lot in a country where it is in a state of deplorable barbarism” (letter cited in Kimball, pg 54. Also cited in the first Randall volume, pg 132).

This is very interesting to keep in mind while reading through Kimball’s well-documented portrait of Jefferson’s musical interests. I had some idea beforehand that Jefferson had played the violin at some point, but I had no idea that he had owned quite a large chunk of music over the course of his life, some even copies in his own handwriting. It is also sad to note, however, that when one of his great-granddaughters had possession of these handwritten copies, a servant boy had tossed a good portion of them into a hearthfire instead of the old newspapers that he was given for that purpose (Kimball, pg 59). This is just one of the many infuriating injustices done to TJ’s papers, but thats another blog entry.

I don’t have a Picture of the Day for today or yesterday, so that means that tomorrow must be an unprecedented Three-fer!